Theme: Comics

I have in my l life met one or two people who were so well brought up that they had never read a comic. They tended to have an underdeveloped sense of humour. Whether there is a correlation between naughtily spending your lunch money on a Betty and Veronica Digest and having a well-honed grasp of the funny, I will leave to another time.Read more

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And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.Read more

Highlights from the "Comics: Philosophy and Practice" conference at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago. The conference brought together together 17 legendary cartoonists for three days of discussion about the past and future of graphic narrative.Read more

Ing Phouséra, or Séra, as he is known in artistic circles, is a French-Cambodian comics artist who evacuated Phnom Penh with his French mother in 1975. While the subject of his works range far and into other media, he came to my attention for his graphic novels about the Khmer Rouge period and its aftermath in Cambodia: Impasse et Rouge, L'Eau et la Terre and Lendemains de cendres. Read more

“Superman!” gasps Lois Lane, freshly scooped from beneath the nodding carbines of a South American firing squad. “Right!” says the boxy blue-and-red figure who holds her in his arms. “And still playing the role of gallant rescuer!” His mouth is set in a kind of grimace, but with dimples.Read more

One of the reasons Will Eisner quit working on the Spirit in 1952 was so that he could continue working on PS Magazine, an instructional comic dedicated to teaching enlisted men how to perform preventative maintenance on U.S. Army equipment. While there certainly may have been other contributing factors to Eisner’s decision, like the progressive downsizing of the Spirit supplement and changing public opinion about the caricaturization of black sidekicks.Read more

In the opening sequence of Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-1987), a disheveled man wanders the streets of New York, carrying a sign warning of the end of the world. He steps through puddles on the sidewalk, while a blood-stained smiley face pin lies in the street. Read more

The Art of Comics bills itself as the “first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical questions raised by the art of comics”. This much-qualified claim is certainly true, and I have waited anxiously for its publication since I first learned it was in production. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook, the editors of the volume, have assembled an impressive array of philosophers to comment on comics. Read more

A poetry comic by Gary Sullivan.Read more

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History is a combination of a lot of things. You can’t isolate events today and say, “Oh, well, this happened—those awful people.” The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it.Read more

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing #40, "The Curse," is a product of the complex history of race relations within the feminist movement. Read more

Although physically similar to a common white-tailed deer (Ocoileus Virginianus), the spotting deer (Caprelous Vulgaris) is actually a kind of terrestrial slug.Read more

The action sequence is probably the type of comics-making that the greatest number of artists have engaged in (except maybe the gag), and it’s also one of the best tests of a cartoonist’s ability to do what they do convincingly.Read more

There’s a comic Freud used to illustrate his famous essay, “Interpretation of Dreams,” called “A French Nurse's Dream.” The connection between comics and dreams is apparently so direct even Freud did not feel it necessary to explain.Read more

When I first tried to read Heidegger, I was in the thick of a doctoral program, investigating what I perceived to be the rampant hostility directed in Western thought at visual paradigms.Read more

More than any other of Burroughs’ many creations, Tarzan has become a staple of popular culture, a process which began almost immediately: 1918 marked the first version of the novel in the relatively new forum of popular cinema, a film that would be one of the first to gross over one million dollars.Read more

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